Five Songs the Phillips Kane Band Never Covered
by Anne Bowman
Summary: An alternate-universe look at five turning points; or, what could have happened. Molly-centric. WIP.
1. friend of the devil

1. take me back to tulsa

He says, don't wait up.

She stays awake until daylight anyway, watching the baby, because thinking about the baby and anticipating his needs keeps her mind and her fingers busy. She gives him a warm bottle before he has time to cry for it. She counts the seconds until he falls asleep again, and listens to him breathe in the darkness. It's the middle of the summer, and the window's open; she stares outside and starts to think about Rick, and what he's chasing in the darkness god knows how many miles away.

The baby's breath catches in his throat, and she's on her feet again.

In the morning, she wakes up in a panic. The house is silent. She looks over. Jack's awake, smiling at the ceiling.

The front door opens noisily, despite his clumsy, futile attempt to enter undetected.

"Hey," he says breathlessly, from the doorway of the nursery. "You stay up all night again?"

She picks up the baby, who presses his face into her shoulder but doesn't make a sound. "No. Where were you?"

Rick closes the window. "I had a lead. I told you."

"You're not a writer," she says.

He looks at her like she's slapped him. She smiles at the baby, pretending she doesn't notice.

"You're not a journalist," she finally amends. "You don't get 'leads.' Even if you find what you're looking for, no one's going to care. You'll just be another quack. Even if you're right." She hands him the baby. "I'm going to bed."

"Mommy needs a nap," she hears him say as she heads down the hallway. "That's all, baby. Don't you worry."

She closes the door, and stays in bed for the rest of the day, thinking about that poor kid's lot in life. He deserves better: a better father, a better home, a better life, a better mother.

When dusk begins to set in, Rick sits on the edge of the bed, guitar in hand, and waits for her to laugh:

_I ran into the devil, babe, he loaned me twenty bills  
I spent the night in Utah in a cave up in the hills  
set out running but I take my time, a friend of the devil is a friend of mine  
if I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight_

"That's not an answer," she reminds him.

"The truth's always just around the corner. Just over the next hill. I give up," he says dramatically, throwing himself across the bed.

This time, she does laugh, crawls on top of him. "It's good to have you back," she whispers.

"I was always here," he says, kissing her.

She could argue, but she doesn't. He rests his hands on the small of her back.

"I never left. Never will," he murmurs.

"I'm going to hold you to that." She draws an X across his heart with the tip of her finger, again and again.

"Hope to die," he says.

("Friend of the Devil," Grateful Dead, 1970)

Notes:

1. "Take Me Back to Tulsa" is the title of a Bob Wills song that goes: _take me back to Tulsa, I'm too young to marry._


	2. it's too late

2. but I always thought that I'd see you again

She adds the song to the set list at the last minute. John sees it before the show, and laughs. "Sandy Denny," is all he says, before disappearing with some 16-year-old.

She takes the lead:

_there's something wrong here, there can be no denying  
one of us is changing, or maybe we've just stopped trying  
and it's too late, baby, now it's too late  
though we really did try to make it_

By sunrise, she's in her old bedroom, thirteen years old again. Only this time Jack's beside her in the bed, sleeping soundly, too old for the crib her mother set up in the corner, and she's got a pounding headache and a longing for something indefinite that consumes her. Is it a drink, the past, a pen, a husband?

She doesn't drink, doesn't eat, doesn't write, doesn't call him. During the day, Jack colors in newspaper margins, and she borrows a red crayon to circle ads for jobs and apartments. She never gets up the nerve to call any of the numbers, but it makes everyone feel better.

Three weeks pass before she figures out what's wrong with her.

She entertains the idea of never telling him, of disappearing forever with two breathing remnants of her greatest mistake. And then she thinks of Sandy Denny, dying alone at the bottom of a staircase. She looks at the date on a calendar and does the math in her head, then packs up the car.

If he ever spoke to her, she knows her father would say: _you certainly have turned taking the coward's way out into an art_.

_Don't I know it_, she'd tell him.

She tells her mother the reason why she's leaving, and when her father finds out, what he does say is: _that's nice_.

Her mother says, "Don't be a stranger."

She doesn't say, _stranger than what?_

John and Rick are playing a show out in California tonight, she remembers, and it only stings a little that they soldiered on without her, the third wheel. She'll surprise them. After the show, she'll tell him.

In California, she looks at him on stage, singing his heart out, and she thinks: maybe this will be good enough. This stage, that guitar, a new baby. Maybe a girl. Maybe that'll be enough to keep his feet on the ground. This time.

And anyway, staying really is the best thing for everyone. Like she could take care of one kid on her own, let alone two. It's the right decision.

It really is.

He sees her, out in the crowd, and a smile spreads across his face. Beside him, John starts to play a familiar song, staring her down.

_there'll be good times again for me and you  
but we just can't be together  
don't you feel it, too?_

She makes her way backstage.

("It's Too Late," Carole King, 1971)

--

Notes:

_but I always thought that I'd see you again_ is taken from the James Taylor song "Fire and Rain."

Sandy Denny, who is referred to in this section, was a talented, insecure folk singer with alcohol and drug problems who fell down a flight of stairs and died of a cerebral hemorrhage while separated from her husband.


	3. dark star

3. the kind of debt no honest man could pay

She adjusts the baby on her hip, and avoids his eyes. "Are you kidding? No offense, honey, but why would this person tell you the 'truth,' if he knew it?" _She?_ she wonders, idly. "And what makes him different from all the rest?"

"I'll ask him." She can hear the smile in his voice, and it only irritates her more.

"No, you won't," she says firmly. "You're not going. Not tonight."

"Why not?"

She busies herself with wresting the car keys from Fiona's perpetually grubby, inquisitive fingers. "I told you why not."

"A feeling, huh?" He comes up behind her, snakes his arms around her waist. "Since when," he asks, "do you believe in premonitions or weird feelings?"

"Better safe than sorry." She turns around, bounces Fiona. "Isn't that right, baby?"

Fi cackles in response.

"I don't want you to get hurt. Fiona doesn't want you to get hurt. You're not going," she repeats. "Just call the guy back, tell him you need something more to go on before you meet strangers in the middle of the night."

He sighs.

She studies his face. She's so tired of having this fight; she's tempted just to let him go.

"For us," she tries one last time. "Please?"

The baby reaches out, grabs his pointer finger, won't let go. She hands Fiona over to him, and feels only slightly guilty about using her daughter to guilt-trip her husband into staying home.

He says, "Okay."

The next day, they're all in the car, bundled up against the cold. In the backseat, Fi babbles happily in her carseat, and Jack idly complains about the noise, his forehead pressed against the window. She turns around to face him, ready to explain that it's normal, that it'll pass.

So she never sees it coming.

The impact of the collision propels the car off the road, down an incline, into a tree.

The baby shrieks as she drifts away. She tries to fight, to look at Rick, to ask about Jack, but she just can't. Honestly, it's so much easier to just give up.

The other driver, apparently unharmed, disappears.

It becomes the one event for which Rick never proposes a supernatural explanation. After all, if it had been a sign, or a warning, then he had put them all in danger. If it had been a sign or a warning, he couldn't persist in his dogged quest for answers.

So he remains silent on the issue.

He stops talking about his "leads" and his "sources," or stops telling her about them, and she likes to think that's because he understands that the four weeks she spends in a hospital bed are the only answer she'll ever need.

The first night she's back home, long after the kids have fallen asleep, he strokes her hair and waits for her to join in:

_I met you several years ago, the times they were so strange, but I had a feeling  
you looked into my eyes just once, an instant flashing by that we were stealing  
another time you felt so bad, and I wasn't any help at all, as I recall_

_dark star, I see you in the morning, sleeping next to me  
dark star, let the memory of the evening be the first thing that you think of  
when you open up your smile and see me, dark star_

("Dark Star," Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1977)

--

Notes:

_the kind of debt no honest man could pay_ is an adapted line from The Band's version of "Atlantic City." Bruce Springsteen wrote the song, but The Band's version is highly superior.


	4. decameron

4. such a long, long time to be gone

"I really need the money," John mutters over the phone, and enough time has passed since it happened that she only hesitates for about ten days before she says, "Okay."

So they give it a try, but there's an unspoken rule: they can't play any of the songs he wrote.

That narrows it down.

They sit on the floor in John's apartment at 3am, and he's finishing his 400th cigarette of the evening when she begins to strum "I Want To See the Bright Lights Tonight."

"Richard and Linda," John muses. "I don't know if we could pull it off."

"That's what you said about 'The Chain,'" she points out. "You come up with a song, then. I'm doing all the work."

"They're my records," he says mildly, gesturing to the albums spread out across the floor. "We have to pick the right songs, or they're all going to demand their money back."

She sighs. "I don't even know if I can do this, John. Sing, get up on stage, play this stupid thing. Without him."

"You did before."

"That was before," she says. "This is after."

They sit in silence for a while.

"Anyway, the reason we can't do Richard and Linda, or whatever else," he says, "is that we lack the requisite chemistry, you and I. He was... you know?"

"Yeah," she says. "I know."

"Honestly, I kind of blame you for it, a little. Your advance warning, and all. I heard that song you wrote." He looks down at the guitar in his lap. "Who else would have believed you, if not him?"

Her throat is constricting painfully, but she manages to say, "After the first time, my 'feelings' didn't count for much anymore." If he'd gone to get his answers that night, he had pointed out, nothing would have happened. If she had never told him, no one would have gotten hurt. It was the first time they had discussed "that night" in two and a half years. How could she argue? For once, he was earthbound, and her head was in the clouds.

"You could have talked him to death until he stayed," John persists. "Could have told me, I could have done it."

She sighs, closes her eyes, tries this out: "You have no idea what it was like." _Inside the house_, she means, or _inside the marriage_. Maybe she's trying to hurt him, a little. But there's no satisfaction in it. There's nothing left to win, and anyway, she already won, again and again, and what good did that do?

He doesn't challenge her, although he could. Instead, he just says, "You could have called. I could have intervened somehow."

She shrugs, stares at her hands. "It was a family matter."

He looks momentarily stung, confirming her suspicion that salting his wounds is an empty pursuit. But after a moment, he concedes, "I loved him. But it wouldn't have done any good. That wasn't enough."

"No," she agrees, and then a peace offering: "Nothing ever was."

She closes her eyes, and begins to play.

_they listened to his voice grow pale  
no stamps were on the morning mail  
they all listened to the white truck ring  
words just didn't mean a thing_

_see me fly, see me cry, see me walk away  
every time the sun shines, to me it's a rainy day_

She looks up, and his eyes are wet.

He says, "I want a drink," and sets his guitar on the floor. "Join me?"

A peace offering, she thinks.

"Okay," she says.

She takes his hand, and he helps her to her feet.

("Decameron," Fairport Convention, 1968)

--

Notes:

_such a long, long time to be gone_ is a line from "Box of Rain," by the Grateful Dead. In a spooky coincidence, this was the last song Jerry Garcia performed with the band before he died exactly one month later. The entire song is about death, and the final lines are: _such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there._


End file.
